Steering Behaviors for Autonomous Vehicles in Virtual Environments

Joseph Kearney
Department of Computer Science
University of Iowa

Abstract

This talk will present steering behaviors that control autonomous vehicles populating roadways in our virtual urban environment. Behavior programming is facilitated by a set of representations of the environment that use convenient frames of reference in natural coordinate systems. Roadway surfaces are modeled as three-dimensional ribbons that make the local orientation of the road explicit and allow relative distances on the road to be simply computed. Roads and intersections are connected to form a ribbon network. An egocentric representation called a path melds road and intersection segments into a single, continuous ribbon that captures the vehicle's short-term plan of navigation. A topological structure called a route supports way finding. I will describe how the interrelated ribbon, path, and route representations are used to build multi-component behaviors that plan routes and safely navigate through traffic filled road networks -- tracking lanes, shifting lanes to avoid congestion, anticipating lane changes needed to make turns dictated by the route, negotiating intersections, and respecting the rules of the road.

I will also give an overview of psychological research conducted in our bicycling simulator examining how children and adults choose and cross gaps at intersections in traffic filled roadways. Lastly, I'll summarize the results of our research comparing distance perception of real and virtual environments.

This is joint work conducted with Jim Cremer, Hongling Wang, Pete Willemsen (Computer Science) and Jodie Plumert (Psychology).

Speaker Bio

Joseph K. Kearney is a Professor of Computer Science and Associate Dean for Research and Development in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Iowa. Kearney earned his B.A. in psychology from the University of Minnesota. He went on to earn an M.A. in experimental psychology from the University of Texas before returning to Minnesota to take his M.S. and Ph.D. (1983) in computer science. He has been a member of the computer science faculty at Iowa since 1983. He served as chair of his department from 1993 to 1996 and as director of the School of Library and Information Science from 2000 to 2002.

Kearney's current research focuses on behavior, scene, and scenario modeling for virtual environments. With Professors Jim Cremer and Jodie Plumert, he co-directs the Hank Simulation Lab with that houses a virtual bicycling simulator. With funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Center for Injury Prevention, he is investigating how virtual environments can be used as laboratories for the study of human behavior. He has also published research in psychophysics, computer vision, modeling of human movement, and computer animation.